Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: Butler refuses to fix the body as primary, as antecedent to discourse. ‘The body posited as prior to the sign is always posited or signified as prior’ (1993: 30). We cannot have any access to the body except through discourse. Yet, this does not mean that the body can be reduced to discourse. Indeed, the body exceeds discourse, and reworks the very norms that would constrain it. Butler has as little patience for an idealism that would reduce all matter to signs as she does with a materialism that would reductively separate matter from signs. The former ignores the fact that matter cannot be created by discourse; the latter ignores the fact that matter is always and only materialised through discourse. Both remain blind to the simple truth that all signs are themselves material (1993: 15, 30).
For Butler, therefore, the body can never serve as an ontological foundation (Stone 2005: 11). The body cannot ground a theory of feminist politics any more than it can ground a theory of gender. Nonetheless, to say this is not to dismiss the body, nor is it to ignore the critics’ constant question, ‘what about the body?’ (1993: ix). While Butler rejects any theory grounded in an ontology of the body, she still finds something fundamental about bodies: bodies, for Butler, are vulnerable. A body is both dependent upon others and subject to violation by another, by others. Through our bodies we always remain exposed to others, and our very vulnerability ties us to others (2004b: 20, 22). In this sense, and only in this sense, we find something primary about the body, something fundamental, undeniable. This paper will demonstrate that Butler takes the body just as seriously – and, at times, perhaps much more seriously – than her critics.
The problem is not the body per se. What is lacking in Butler’s politico-theoretic project is not an attentiveness to the potential pain and suffering of bodies: Butler has been centrally concerned with this issue from the very beginning of her work. Rather, Butler’s critics ask after the materiality of the body, I think, because they are concerned about what Butler’s theory of gender does with/to sex. Butler’s critics, both implicitly and explicitly, worry most about the primacy and materiality of sex, and the epistemological grounding that it provides. More to the point: if sex is really gender ‘all the way down’, then is there no such thing as sex? And if everything is gender, then does the body no longer matter? I will try to reconstruct this implicit logic of the critics, to illustrate that the criticisms about ‘the body’ stem from a much deeper concern about the place of sex in Butler’s radical theory of gender.
As an answer to her critics, the title Bodies that Matter contains within it the straightforward assertion that bodies do matter. But the word ‘matter’ in the title also clearly carries a double meaning. In the text, Butler articulates a theory of materialisation: she shows how bodies matter in the sense of becoming materialised through discourse. Perhaps, however, what her critics want most of all is to know how, within a radical constructivist theory of gender, the body matters in the sense of being important, proving significant for both theory and politics. Butler was undoubtedly cognisant of the two senses of matter within the title that she herself chose. And yet, to answer this question concerning the second sense of matter requires a further exploration than Butler has explicitly provided of the role of ‘sex’ within a theory that proves sex to be subject to gender norms. If sex no longer serves as the ontological ground that gives rise to gender, then does sex simply disappear? And if it does not, then what role will it play?
Working with both the resources supplied by Butler herself (her writings) and those called on by her (the writings of Foucault and Beauvoir), this essay will theorise the body by way of reconstructing a Butlerian theory of sex/gender. The key to such a reconstruction will lie in insisting on two points simultaneously: 1) always stressed by Butler, sex is itself gendered and thus sex does not lie outside of gender norms, nor causally produce them, but is instead a product of those norms, and 2) not often emphasised or made clear by Butler, sex cannot be reduced to gender. The category of sex has a crucial role to play even within a radical theory of sex/gender that takes sex itself to be gendered. To gender sex is not to do away with sex. This point can be elaborated and explained within the frame of Butler’s project, even if she herself has not always been careful to stress it.